Why Student Fieldtrips Make an Impact

Impact in recent years has become the most dreaded and controversial concept that has taken over both the Research
Excellence Framework (REF) - how university funding and the fate of
academic careers is measured - as well as Research Council funding.

The
most crucial element of this criteria is not just that our research has
an impact, but that we can prove it.

The latter part is what makes academics
cringe - how do you prove impact when you deal with ideas and concepts?

There have been a number of debates around this question and the
challenges of measuring the intangible nature of impact. My experience
tells me that fieldtrips make an important impact and should be counted
as such.

It was a busy year for me in 2013, not least because of
the number of research, writing, and lecturing invitations I took up,
but also because I took on the conceptualisation, planning and
organisation of a six-day field trip for our students with another
colleague.

A
city like Mumbai presents a rich laboratory for exploring any of the
themes on citizenship, identity, migration, belonging, transnationalism,
social justice, bourgeois environmentalism, everyday urban politics and
so on - seen in the number of student fieldtrips (in geography and
other social science disciplines) that are currently visiting the city
both from UK and internationally.

Fieldtrips are a measure of
intellectual dialogue and development not just for the faculty and
students but also for wider society.

You can say that all teaching has impact, but I think the fieldtrip
deseres special mention. The impacts are both long and short-term, but
they are also quite distinct from generic teaching.

In the LSE Impact Blog,
Peter Wade, professor of social anthropology at the University of
Manchester, notes that the REF's narrow definition of impact rules out
the historical role of teaching in relation to the social role of the
university.

Also writing for the blog,
John Parkinson, associate professor of public policy at the University
of Warwick, says the current impact agenda should consider the impact of
inspirational teaching.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the 56 indicators of impact
as alternatives for the REF exercise prepared by the Center for the
Study of Interdisciplinarity, which provide a compelling argument for
considering this as an important space for impact generation.

Here
are six ways that I think fieldtrips make an impact and should be
counted and rewarded by the REF or any other form of banal measuring
system that decides the winners and losers in the academic (increasingly
neoliberal) marketplace.

This is self-explanatory. For me, organising the Mumbai fieldtrip was a
direct impact of my research into pedagogy. I enjoyed taking lectures
for this module which prepared the students for what they would
encounter in Mumbai, as well as taking them to a city that I love, both
professionally and personally.

Intellectual dialogue and development

Taking
students to my own research field helped me see my work in a different
light. Students asked me questions about things they saw, which to me
were routine, and when I found answers to them it helped me reflect upon
my own biases and insider/ outsider paradoxes. This is an ongoing
process, which has continued since our return and beyond.

Developing student skills

Many students who become interested in particular themes of sites
during fieldwork pick up these topics for a PhD or become interested in
employment in issues dealing with debates covered in fieldtrips.Internationalisation as impact

In an era where several universities are either closing down their
fieldtrip provisions or reducing them to UK/EU destinations, the Mumbai
fieldtrip bodes well for the aspirations of university
internationalisation. This is a different kind of impact from the
international courses on the global south that most universities offer -
the impact is evident in the actual learning-by-doing nature of
fieldtrips that raise the profile of universities and departments which
offer them.

Creative outcomes

Often fieldtrip
reflective logs are used in pedagogic research, but I think the
potential could be exploited further to include outcomes that have wider
societal impact. This year students are making a visual essay as part
of their assessment, and these will be screened at a special event in
the department. Not only will the best essays be showcased during open
days and potentially on our homepage, but as online visual pieces, they
will be open access and hence their impact will be on a completely
different scale than conventional academic journal articles. So watch
this space.

Media mentions

Our visit to an Urdu
school in Mumbai was reported in Sahara, India's leading Urdu newspaper.
This is the stuff that REF celebrates as impact, and although it is not
about conventional research, I see our presence in the media as an
important transgression of pedagogy into the realm of local language
media and arguably higher mpact than English language based
Anglo-American open access journals.

This is an edited version of a blog first published on the City Inside Out blogAyona Datta is senior lecturer in the school of geography at the University of Leeds - follow her on Twitter @AyonaDatta

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ABOUT ME

Dr Robert Muller is an experienced, and well-published author, teacher and researcher who has been teaching and conducting research in Sociology, Criminology, Politics and Public Health in the university sector since 1993. In addition, Robert has been teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) since 1984 in a range of different cultures, including Turkey, Italy, England, and Australia.